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Sweden Defends Wiki Sex Case About-Face
crimeandpunishment writes "Mistake? We didn't make a mistake. That's what Swedish prosecutors said Sunday as they defended their handling of a rape allegation against Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. The Swedish Prosecution Authority said the prosecutor who issued the arrest warrant Friday did not make a mistake, even though a higher-ranked prosecutor withdrew the warrant the next day. A spokesperson for the Authority said: 'The prosecutor who took over the case yesterday had more information, and that is why she made a different assessment than the on-call prosecutor.' Assange, who was in Sweden seeking legal protection for the site as it prepares to leak more Afghan war documents, told a Swedish tabloid newspaper, 'I don't know who's behind this but we have been warned that for example the Pentagon plans to use dirty tricks to spoil things for us.'" We covered the warrant being issued and withdrawn yesterday.
Very similar to this http://www.stopthechamber.com/ where the amount of money in rewards which lead to the arrest and conviction of Julian Assange will reach into the millions, or tens of millions, and once that happens it's only a matter of time before somebody accuses him of something. Or maybe they don't have to accuse him of anything, there are enough laws and enough ways to entrap people that anybody can be taken out if enough informants agree to take them out.
Confidential informants working in teams can entrap or find evidence on anybody. If the money is big enough and the government agrees to look the other way on the quality of the information, they could get him for some esoteric unknown law that he probably doesnt even know hes breaking and never heard of. And once hes arrested it's all over.
You might want to read up on the pirate bay trial, if you really want an insight in how well the system here works. There have been plenty of fucked up cases before that, but it's unusually well covered in English. It's pretty much par of the course though when things get political or when prestige gets involved.
TL;DR: You have no idea how fucked up the system really is, and you don't want to know, just remember the next time you hear about how fantastic we are that we're really a banana monarchy under cover, without bananas.
This could easily go the other way. What if the accuser was a plant for Wikileaks. Everyone sympathizes with Assuage, conspiracy theories run a muck and suddenly leaking classified material is heralded by more of the mainstream. You know, as opposed to the usual crowd.
So, which results of Assange's "data thieving" (those bits belong to me! stop putting them in the same order!) are most offensive? Does it concern you most that he might help stop Americans being sent to kill and to die unnecessarily, or simply that he uncovers incompetence and corruption?
releases it without any effort put into finding out if theres anything of value
You clearly haven't read them.
or wrong actually IN it.
Even if you don't believe that he asked for help redacting data, and even if you don't believe that the delays in release are to check for problems with content, you're forgetting:
You give the public way, way, way too much credibility. I'm sitting in a coffee shop right now surrounded by about 20 people, if you had to guess, how many of them do you think know who Julian Assange is? Know what wikileaks is even?
It's been front page news in the UK in the last few days (there's a picture of the Guardian's front page in the Fox News article).
It's currently on the front page of the websites of the Guardian, Independent, BBC, Times, Daily Mail and Telegraph -- that's all the major UK news papers except the Sun, which won't report on Assange until he's sleeping with Victoria Beckham.
The American news sites I checked have quite different stories and headlines. Is the US government behind all the anti-Wikileaks headlines I see?